Hello slackware users,

My task is to set-up a dedicated LAMP server to host a site with joomla (this is basically LAMP + joomla which is a PHP-based content management system). Beside the basic web content, the site will hold a large amount of sample videos and similar large files (2TB on a RAID is available a lot of them will be used).

I googled a lot, and I read a lot about all the virtualisation solutions such as kvm, xen, virtualbox, vmware, openvz and vserver, I more or less understand their properties, but I cannot decide which one to choose.

I tried a few of them but I have no experience about its long term usage, stability etc.

In short I need an advice from people who successfully running real-word sites with some virtualisation solution. Basically I would like to know which one to use for the more robust, stable server.

Only read further if you have a similar system.

I would like to use some kind of virtualisation solution for the joomla server, because

• I have no trust in such systems, so if it is hacked I will just recover from a backup (or reinstall) the guest, but I do not need to go to the server-park. (after it, I have to find out how it was hacked)

• perhaps later we would like to use some other services which is also good if they are separated

I would like to use Slackware as a host and a guest.

I would like to put one file-system to the large raid array, and share it among the virtual-servers if it is possible (there is only one server now but there could be more with different applications). Or do I need to use lvm on the raid for the different servers?

Here is what I think:

• Because I want to "run linux on linux", first I thought that a container based solution (vserver, openvz) is perfect for the job, because of the low overhead and because I can use the whole file system for the storage, and I can share free space with other services in the future. The problem is vserver and openvz are big patches for the kernel, but I would like to change slackware as small as possible. So I would like to stay with the kernel of slack-13.0. openvz does not even support 2.6.29 while vserver is, but I have to compile a new patched kernel. So the the options here are to use a different kernel with openvz, or use the same but patched kernel with vserver.

• Another option is to use "real" virtualisation solutions such as kvm, xen, virtualbox and vmware. It seems that kvm is the future, because it is already in the official kernel and "powered" by Red Hat, so it will be well supported. I likely will choose kvm.

As i wrote I tried a few of them but I have no experience about its long term usage, stability, so I want here about which one is used in real word servers, what kind of problems (stability) they have, etc.?

Thanks for your time,
fdeak

I've been using KVM and software RAID with Slackware guests on Slackware hosts for a couple years to host LAMP and Sendmail systems. This setup works very well for me from a stability and robustness perspective.

Thanks Chuck56!
Are you using the default kernel? And if yes, are you using kvm modules from the slackware kernel or a newer one from the kvm site?

One answer for this question means that only a few people use slackware for this kind of purpose or the question was wrong?

fdeak

I use the default kernel of Slackware 13 and add the most recent kvm-kmod and qemu-kvm. I used the stock kvm modules for a while but the kvm project releases updates rapidly enough to justify installing kvm-kmod.

The kvm setup works better for me than when I used VMWare Server 1.x a couple years ago.

I started testing KVM a couple of months ago, and am now running 8 Windows XP guests (all in daily use by different people) and 2 Slackware guests (test servers). I'm using the latest kernel from kernel.org (oldconfig with the generic Slackware config) and qemu-kvm from their development Git repository. The official qemu-kvm version worked well with the Slackware guests, but had time drift problems with the Windows guests.

I'm using raw images for all the guest disks, and these are located on a RAID1 setup (5 disks, two groups of 2 disks and 1 shared spare) using EXT4. The Windows guests are all running in snapshot mode, for easy rollback when users mess up Windows.

The Windows guests are using plain rtl8139 for network and IDE for disks, and the Linux guests are using virtio for network and IDE for disks. I have tested virtio for disks also, but I found it lacking in performance (sort of choppy, irregular performance). Network for all guests is setup using taps, so each guest have its own "real" IP number on the LAN.

I do not use libvirt, but plain qemu-kvm.

So far I've been VERY pleased with KVM. It performs a lot better than Virtualbox and VMware (the only other options I've tried). It is a bit rough around the edges in the UI department, but I'm sure that will improve over time. Stability is great (I've not had a single crash since I started testing it), and I personally like how easy it is to get up and running.